This invention relates to a technology for accomplishing high-speed data transfer between a server module and a storage module.
As a computer system in which a server and a storage machine accessed by the server are coupled to each other, the following systems are known.
One known computer system of this type couples a server and storage via a network such as a SAN (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2012-118973 (Related-art Example 1)).
In Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2012-118973, there is disclosed a “storage appliance system, which may include at least one application server for locally executing an application, and one or more storage servers in communication with the application server for I/O transmission therebetween”.
The computer system described above has a utilization mode that is employed by a large-scale computer system. The computer system has an advantage of being highly flexible in system configuration, but has a problem in that the cost of devices constructing the network such as a SAN is high as well as the running cost.
PCI Express (registered trademark) interfaces are known as high-speed interfaces, and there is a known technology that connects two devices by PCI Express (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2012-128717 (Related-art Example 2)). In Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2012-128717, there is disclosed a technology with which communication between two devices is held through a bridge connection of the two devices with the use of a switch that has a non-transparent port and PCI Express.
There is also known a technology for transmitting error information by a PCI Express protocol when a failure occurs at an end point in a computer system that uses PCI Express (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2010-238150 (Related-art Example 3)).